Thatâs a very cute Alaska. Adorable!
Moose have very little representation!!
Ranked ballots might be good for breaking up the lock the two official parties have. That way you could vote for the longshot person youâd like, but still have your 2nd place vote count against the person you canât stand.
In parliamentary systems, itâs usually proposed after an election where the vote on one side is often split between two candidates, allowing a third candidate to squeak through.
As always, the problem is how to get the main parties to agree to it.
is simple fix:
The problem is that, in real life, representatives who care about anything except their own (or their partyâs, or their campaign contributorsâ) agenda are pretty difficult to find. The founding fathers dreamed of the sort of representative (or for that matter elector) who would be acting wisely on behalf of all their constitutents â not just the ones that voted for them â but of course, as I said earlier, when the constitution was written political parties werenât really part of the picture. (Another thing that the founding fathers considered a great idea was that the runner-up candidate in a presidential election would automatically become vice-president. What could possibly go wrong?)
The US system as it is canât support more than two major parties and that is a problem because many points of view essentially stay unrepresented. Compared to the sort of political spectrum we have in most places here in Europe, for example, in the US there is a centre-right party (the Democrats) and a right-wing party (the Republicans), and everything else (the Green Party, for example) is basically second-tier because their candidates have no chance of getting elected to Congress, let alone the presidency. (You get outliers like Bernie Sanders who make for interesting press but arenât really in a position to make actual policy.)
In addition, this system is self-reenforcing because even if someone like Bernie Sanders, as an independent candidate for POTUS, managed to collect an appreciable number of votes these would for the most part come from people who would otherwise have voted for the Democrat candidate. This would in fact be splitting the vote and handing the Republican candidate an easy win because they donât need to win an absolute majority of votes, they just need to win more votes than either of the two other candidates to be allotted all of the electoral votes in the state in question (for most states, anyway). You would have to have a similiarly popular independent candidate on the other side of the aisle to balance this out, and then it would only revert to a neck-to-neck race between the Dems and GOP.
In places like Germany (where I live), seats in the federal parliament are â for the most part â allotted proportionally, and that at least ensures that parties which have a certain amount of traction (5% or more of the popular vote) are indeed represented in parliament. We usually end up with coalition governments and that is generally a good thing because it means that single parties donât get to impose their agenda on everyone; there usually must be some compromise that a majority of legislators can get behind. Oh, and the fact that neither our head of state (the federal president) nor head of government (the federal chancellor) are elected directly by the people makes us basically Trump-proof â which is also a good thing. Representative democracy does have its advantages 
It doesnât always work well, like in Weimar Republic. Has Angela managed to put together a government coalition yet? 
i donât know why, we as americans, look at our own fâed up broken shit and declare there is no way to fix it, when most the rest of the democracies in the world have already cracked those nuts with near universal successâŚ
- gun control
- health care
- voting and voter representation
then i realize the investment made in keeping those systems broken, and the misinformation being fed to the people about why we canât possible fix them, and i get depressed. sorry bob, you can fool most the people most the timeâŚ
get rid of broken unnecessary thing comrad, donât patch around problemâŚno other country has a broken electoral college, because the idea itself is the source of the problem.
The main problem with the Weimar republic was that they didnât have the 5% cutoff rule that we have now. This makes sure that only parties that are reasonably popular end up in parliament, and tends to keep out the kooks (of whom we have an impressive selection).
The last we heard is that Ms Merkel is doing fine. In any case, she remains chancellor until a new government comes in, so itâs not as if the country was in a constitutional crisis or anything. Everything is working as designed.
Why 5% and not 2% or 10%? Can you really call yourselves proportional when you have that threshold? Do you consider the AfD to be kooks?
Iâd assume math, if a fixed number of seats in parliament the percentage would be based off of number of seats in parliament. You can divide up the seats fairly, but a seat canât hold pieces of multiple people. If you have 20 seats, youâd want to fill them proportionally as best you could to match the percentages voted for. that means some seats get rounded up or down and some people removed to evenly divide into the number of slots. Each country has their own way of figuring out this division and they vary slightly, but the goal is the same, to be as close a match to the percentage of the people as possible while still keeping government running.
The division of the people typically has a Long Tail which dictates and end cap for representation.
The 5% applies to getting additional at-large representatives in the German mixed-member proportional representation. It is basically an arbitrary number that denies representation to, for example, small, distributed minorities.
Iâd be careful assuming something is arbitrary just because one doesnât know the reason themselves.
source?
there has to be a way to protect the rights and representation of minorities of all types, i agree with that.
these types of divided representational governments are more not less likely to have systems in place to do just that. the same things that protect their rights against each other also protect those without a current seat. also often several minority groups will join together to try and get a coalition banner group for a seat, which works out getting people to work together for common causes.
It is a fact that they cannot divide the floor and government employee representation down to the last person. for an efficient functional government there has to be a cut off at some point. where and what that is typically decided with great care, not arbitrarily like you conjecture.
If you want to learn about treatment of ethnic minorities in post-WW2 Germany, please read this:
Denying people citizenship and a vote and treating them as sub human is a completely different thing than discussing a properly functioning representational government.
That is more akin to compare that to when our democracy didnât let women or non-caucasians vote, and not really making the point you think it is.
Let me restate my point: governing a society composed by people with multiple opinions require building a governing majority. That can be done at the voter level, with a first-past-the-post system, or at the parliamentary level, with proportional representation. Each of the two systems has advantages and disadvantages. In addition, I am not going to buy the German model of democracy, because it is also not perfect.
Iâd postulate that humans have yet to devise a perfect system.
No one is suggesting cloning a specific implementation, rather discussing the benefits of that style of system over what the USA currently has.
The problem with direct vote systems is that the majority of voters have to be informed about the majority of issues, consistently, and vote on every issue constantly, which is more than a full time job for even a subset of the issues. They are impossible to implement because of the constraints of the physical universe, mainly time.
Directly voting on proportional representation was created specifically to address that, so far it is the best of what humans have come up with, imho. Is there another system that meets your consideration bar of perfection? or that you consider better than proportional representation? If so letâs discuss.
